Police Arrest 125 in Predawn Nighttime Raids on Homeless Shelters
By Nina Bernstein
The police swept through the city's homeless shelters before dawn yesterday, arresting at least 125 men and women on outstanding bench warrants, the authorities said yesterday.
While the police have periodically asked the city's Department of Homeless Services to check computer lists of outstanding warrants against lists of shelter residents, yesterday's raids were unusual in that they took place in the middle of the night in every borough.
Officials of the the Department of Homeless Services said the arrests were intended to make the shelters safer.
"Removing individuals with outstanding warrants from the shelters is one strategy D.H.S. utilizes to ensure all homeless individuals have a safe environment where they can temporarily reside and receive services," the department's statement said.
Sergeant Andrew McInnis, a police spokesman, said he had no information about the specific charges underlying the warrants. Bench warrants are typically issued when people fail to appear in court after receiving summonses for offenses that fall short of those demanding immediate arrest.
Sergeant McInnis did provide the names of 18 men who were arrested at the Fort Washington shelter for the mentally ill and taken into court. According to Manhattan court records, a warrant against one of the men was issued in December 1997 for failing to appear in court on a summons for a trespass violation dating back to March 1995.
Some advocates for homeless people criticized the sweep, saying it could discourage other homeless people from seeking shelter during the coldest nights of the year.
Most of the men arrested at the Fort Washington shelter had trickled back by the end of the day, according to Jerry Stand, a caseworker there. Some of the arrests involved mistaken identity, Mr. Stand said, and the court dismissed minor violations against other men.
Michael Gagliardi, a former police officer who recently joined the city's Homeless Services Department as deputy commissioner for security and helped to plan yesterday's raids, said he did not know what charges the warrants included. He declined to answer any other questions.
The arrests appeared to be an extension of the Giuliani administration's crackdown on "quality of life" crimes like turnstile jumping, which the police have credited in part with reducing overall crime. More recently, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, saying that "sidewalks are not for sleeping," ordered the police to arrest or ticket homeless people who failed to move on and to take others to shelters or hospitals.
Yesterday's sweep only came to light after staff members at some shelters complained to the Coalition for the Homeless, the advocacy group charged by the courts with monitoring the shelters.
The statement from the Homeless Services Department said, "By conducting arrests at several shelters on the same day, individuals with outstanding warrants had little time to learn of the initiative and try to evade the N.Y.P.D."
The coalition said that its information was still incomplete, but that arrests apparently had taken place at shelters in every borough, including the Bedford-Atlantic shelter in Brooklyn, Project Hospitality in Staten Island, the 30th Street Men's Shelter in Manhattan and the Franklin Armory Shelter in the Bronx, where a city caseworker who answered the telephone said seven women had been arrested on Tuesday, shortly before midnight.
Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, said homeless people were often given summonses for ordinance violations like drinking in public, obstructing sidewalks or public urination, and it was common for them to fail to appear in court to answer them, thereby accumulating warrants.
He said arrests for minor violations could disrupt mental health treatment for some of the homeless people and force others to reapply for shelter at a time when the city typically runs out of beds.
In one case that came to the attention of Alissa Schwartz, a shelter inspector for the coalition, a 70-year-old man was roused from his bed at the 30th Street Men's Shelter near Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, arrested and held in a cell until he could be seen by a judge.
Ms. Schwartz said that after his court appearance the man came to the coalition, highly agitated. "It was a summons that he had for urinating in public five months ago, against a wall near the shelter on First Avenue," she said. "He told me that the summons that he got had little or no writing on it and he couldn't figure out what to do or where to report, so he threw it away."
Doug Lasdon, director of the Urban Justice Center, which specializes in legal services for the homeless and mentally ill, said of the raids: "This is one way to intimidate people from using the shelters." And during the current cold spell, he added, "this is just cruel."
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Carl
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